The misadventures, daring exploits, and tragic triple dog dares of a classy girl in her 20s

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Or: It is very strange to have adult responsibilities

We are very proud of our home. It’s a very grown-up thing to have. It keeps the rain off of our heads, and gives us a place to contain stinky ghosts and make marshmallows.

Mom and Dad are so proud of my portrait drawing skills.

It also keeps us from living outside. This is very important, because I live in a place that’s full of bugs.* From March to November, the ground crawls and squirms. Creepy-crawlies hang from the trees and beetles zip through the air at inconvenient knee-level.*Not Australia, though. Australians – how are you even still alive?

This does not include the gnats waiting for you to inhale them.

And they all want to come inside.

They are also much faster than I am.

But you know what? They can’t. Because our house has a secret force field.

My new doodling apparatus has a BLUE option!

Want to know our secret?

I call him Margarine. I do not need to explain myself to you.

It has taken me years to adjust to this strange forcefield. Spiders and I are, of course, natural enemies. Recently, however. our force field was endangered, because of an interloper and adult responsibilities.

You see, we have a mouse. Not a fluffy adorable pet mouse, who we would cuddle and love. A wall mouse. A mouse that scritches and scratches in our bedroom walls and wakes me from my beloved sleep. A mouse who might chew on our wires and throw our home into a electricity-free dystopia.

All wall mice obviously only have 3 feet for manueverability

So I had to call another adult* to come help us deal with the mouse in the walls.*Because my husband is aware that given the slightest opportunity, I would adopt this wall mouse and attempt to turn him into a pet mouse.

Here in our town,* the adult responsible for saving our precious electricity is also the adult responsible for keeping homes bug free. He is the Exterminator.** Which also means that he expected to spray our house for any other pests. He proclaimed the wonderful bargain we would receive: free pest control thrown in with mouse retrieval. He listed all the pests that would never be able to infest our home or darken our doorstep.*And also pretty much every other town ever.
**This must be said with appropriate gravitas, obviously.

But even with the promise of science and technology protecting me, I found myself making a request I never expected to make:

I actually said these words out loud to another grown human.

The Exterminator was perplexed. He asked me if I was sure. He showed me where he could spray to chase the spiders away.**Chase them away from being alive. I’m on to his euphemisms.

He also looked extremely skeptical.

But I’ve been brainwashed, somehow, by the guardians of our grown-up house. I couldn’t let this man destroy our forcefield.

Guys…I couldn’t let him kill the spiders.

There are so many. I may regret this.

And now I’m a little afraid I’ve lost my mind. But if you come to visit, please do not kill our spiders. I worked very hard* to defend them.*Meaning I talked to another adult for like, 5 minutes. Like I said: very hard.

Like this:

Or: It’s Possible Technology Is Beyond Me

I usually think I’m pretty on the ball with all the cool toys living in the future has shared with me. I love my fancy magical smartphone. I clearly enjoy the Internet. Video streaming has enabled me to completely stop going outside in the summertime.**In my defense, nature is out to get me all spring and summer long.

But let’s be honest. I draw my doodles on Post-its, which were invented in 1974, with pens. Like, regular, school-supply style pens.****I do not know when these were invented. Sometime after the whole quill-and-ink system, I bet.

You know, like this.

This is not a very high-tech solution for getting illustrations onto a blog. So I decided that maybe it’s time for an update. Maybe I should be using technology to make my technology-enabled hobby happen.

I’m not a quitter. But I’d like to provide a little bit of comparison here.

This is pretty meta, right?

Well, maybe it’s not so bad…

Ok, the typed text DOES kind of help.

Nope nope nope. It’s pretty bad.

Pixels. I have to worry about pixels now.

A blog jump into the future may take awhile, guys. Because I am clearly not ready for the technologies of the future.******My drawing tablet is apparently from 2010. I’m not ready for the technologies of 6 years ago.

Or: That One Time I Really Regretted Scheduling Something in Advance

Because I have been spoiled by technology and first world niceties, I get to work from home a lot. This is just the absolute best thing, y’all.

Do you not awkwardly stick your tongue out while typing? Is that not a thing?

Except that it means I have to spend all day on my at-home Internet connection. Which I used to think was really great – all fast and shiny and responsive – before I started working from home.

Like this! So fast! So shiny!

It is not fast and shiny and responsive, guys. And it slowly got slower and slower and slower…for two years.**Which is definitely why I didn’t blog for two years. Definitely. Not because of laziness or forgetfulness. It’s all the Internet’s fault, I swear.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I stole all of my husband’s** account information so that I could be the boss of the Internet connection in our house, and called my ISP.*****Oh, yeah, I totally got married in the past two years. Was that not mentioned? ***This stands for “Internet Service Provider.” It is a nice way to say “company I give all my money to.”

Eyelashes illustrate how delightfully polite I was. The first seventeen times.

Things did not improve. I called, and called again. Promises were made and routers were reset. I defended my ability to turn things off and then on again.

There are an unreasonable amount of ink dots on this set of Post-its.

Nothing got better.

Eventually all of my polite eyelashes fell out.

Not even a little bit.

Don’t pretend that you don’t have a “the Internet is being slow” face.

Finally, it was time for serious action. Finally, it was time for me to break up with my ISP. I didn’t want to be a heartless monster, but I did want my Internet to work. You know, so I could work.

So I made a plan, and set up a start date for a different ISP to come and give me all the Internet.

I didn’t want to be too harsh on my current ISP, though. I wanted to give them some warning. So I called and told them the bad news. We could no longer be together, as of next Monday. But we needed to stay together until then, because it was currently Wednesday, and I still had work to do. We could still be together for six days, so they had time to fill the hole I left with another valued customer. My ISP cried softly****, but honored my wishes.****Spent a lot of time trying to up-sell me other things like phone service and TV.

Oh wait…

Or rather, they turned my Internet off immediately. In the middle of a work day. Ten minutes before a meeting.

It clearly must have been a mistake. So I called them.

Very calmly. I called them very, very calmly.

This, of course, marking the 37th***** call I had made to them in the past six months.*****This is the actual number of times. Not an exaggeration.

This was no simple accident made by customer service, it turned out. They’d burned their bridges. They’d salted the earth. They’d somehow backdated my end-of-service date to be two months ago. They couldn’t re-open my account…so if I wanted Internet (for the next six days), I needed to open a new account.

I had no choice. If I didn’t accept their terms, I couldn’t work. So I opened this new account, amidst promises that the service would be instantly restored and better than ever before, and I could cancel my account in six days and get all my money back.

ISPs: Not really good at fixing things.

Thus, my slow Internet was restored. And six days later, I once again called and broke up with my ISP, and followed all their post-breakup instructions.

And I have spent the last eight months calling my ISP to assure them that yes, I have indeed broken up with them, with both accounts, and I do not in fact owe them any money.

I am still getting bills.

And that is how I learned that ISPs are much, much better at revenge than I am.

Or: How Adding Feet to Something Makes it EVEN MORE AMAZING

*Let’s just agree that this is what the Super Bowl should be called. Actual bowls are not involved. More chicken wings are involved than bowls. Bowl-shaped stadiums are not worthy of event names.

OK, Internet. I have a confession to make. It may be hard for you to hear (or read)…but I just have to get it off my chest. Here we go.

I am not good at sports things.

I do not understand soccer. I do not understand tennis, Rugby is a mystery, and I think cricket is an insect. I barely understand hockey and baseball. I threw an entire party last year based around two concepts: I don’t understand football** and I wanted to impress a guy I liked***.**What do you mean that yellow line isn’t real? It appears on my screen during EVERY GAME. My TV wouldn’t lie to me!***This has worked out very well for me. I highly recommend this tactic. Mostly because I still TOTALLY like this guy, and he likes me back. I’ll tell you all about it later.

I know that in this modern era, this is a shameful thing to admit. But I’m being brave for you, Internet. Because something really important happened while I was watching sports.**********Which I was totally doing again this year to impress the same guy.

Guys. I watched someone win a design argument ON LIVE TV. And if you watched Sunday SportsBall, you did too. Let me explain:

Things don’t just pop into being in the world of entertainment. The things we see every day are the result of someone else’s brain-magic pumping out ideas and putting them down on paper.

In this blog dramatization of a story I made up in my head, the role of “shark creator” will be played by my doodle.

Someone legitimately sat down, considered what would be the best possible background for Katy Perry singing “California Girls” would be, and determined that singing beachballs and lip-syncing sharks with legs was the way to go. They not only had to sketch this idea out on paper, but more horrifyingly, they then undoubtedly had to present it to their peers and supervisors.

When one presents an idea to one’s peers and supervisors, one is always about three times their size. Proportionality between humans varies based on situations, and has nothing to do with how much space was left on my doodle-post-it during this drawing.

Presenting creative concepts to a gathering of peers and supervisors is rough. And this person was presenting the concept of sharks with legs.************Coincidentally, this is how the apocalypse will actually happen. Forget about zombies. We’re seeing the future dance before us.

Creative genius can involve moments of harsh criticism.

But the key to getting the creative ideas you believe in turned into reality is having a solid argument ready.

Such as “you guys blew the budget for REAL sharks on building a shiny rolling lion.”

A good argument is really the only way to get your way. We all learned this as children.

After winning an argument, while crafting your creative masterpiece, it’s important to listen to songs verifying that you are, in fact, doin’ it your way.

This argument surely happened long before Sunday SportsBall actually took place. That means the poor inventor of these sharkian masterpieces was forced to suffer the silent ridicule and judgement of his or her peers every day until the mystical Half-Time show.

Lots of them, I’m sure. I was watching the commercials.

That’s when the magic went live:

The sharks eclipsed everyone, let’s be honest. No one saw Katy Perry. No one saw the girls in bikinis. The dancing trees are hardly worth mentioning, and the singing beachballs were basically just backup for the sharks.

And then the Internet responded.

Yes, the Internet has Favorite Things. The Internet is just as cool and popular as Oprah, guys,

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win an argument AND get to design shark costumes with feet.

I hope this person received a massive trophy from his or her workplace.

NOTE: This story is not even slightly based in fact. It’s just the only explanation I can come up with for how lip-syncing plush sharks with feet made it onto one of the most-watched television events in America.

In case you somehow missed it, or do not live in America, I’d like to introduce you to the stars of the Super Bowl:

This image is courtesy of mlive.com – Click to read just one of the many fabulous stories on the sharks. Specifically, Left Shark, hero of the Internet.

I think I would understand sports so much more if there were more sharks involved.

I'm Michelle. This is my blog. I write about women and fatness, expound upon semi-coherent thoughts I have in the middle of the night, and offer tough love to those in whom I am disappointed; they are legion.